Title case converter
Convert a headline to AP, Chicago, MLA or APA title case — four genuinely different rule sets — plus sentence case, Start Case, UPPERCASE and lowercase. Every word shows the rule that decided it, and the preview measures whether the headline fits a search result.
AP style
Your converted headline appears here
Associated Press. Lower-cases articles and any preposition or conjunction of three letters or fewer; everything of four letters or more is capitalised, prepositions included. First and last word always capitalised.
Search-result widthmeasured, not counted
Type a headline and it is measured in Arial at 20px — the font Google renders desktop result titles in — against the 600px column those titles sit in. Width is what decides truncation, not character count: “Will Will Will Will” and “MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM” are the same length and nowhere near the same width.
Every style at oncewhere the four style guides disagree
Paste a headline to see all eight versions side by side. Try one with a four-letter preposition in it — “a guide to writing with confidence” — and AP and Chicago part company immediately.
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you paste is uploaded.
Four style guides, four different answers
“Title case” is not one rule. It is at least four, and they disagree often enough that the same headline comes out differently depending on who is publishing it. Take a guide to writing with confidence:
- AP — A Guide to Writing With Confidence
- Chicago — A Guide to Writing with Confidence
- MLA — A Guide to Writing with Confidence
- APA — A Guide to Writing With Confidence
The split is about how each guide defines a minor word. AP and APA use a length test: anything of four letters or more gets a capital, so “With”, “From”, “Into” and “Between” are capitalised even though they are prepositions. Chicago and MLA use a part-of-speech test: prepositions are lower-case at any length, which is why the canonical Chicago rendering is “Somewhere over the Rainbow” and not “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
The last word
AP, Chicago and MLA all capitalise the final word of a title no matter what it is. APA does not. So the one thing I am proud of becomes “The One Thing I Am Proud Of” in the first three and “The One Thing I Am Proud of” in APA. This is the difference people most often assume is a bug in a converter, and it is the reason the tool above names the rule next to every word.
Hyphenated compounds
This is where MLA and Chicago finally part company, because on minor words they are nearly identical. MLA capitalises whatever follows a hyphen. Chicago leaves the second element lower-case when the first element is a prefix that cannot stand alone as a word, and when the compound is a spelled-out number.
- anti-intellectual — MLA: Anti-Intellectual · Chicago: Anti-intellectual
- e-commerce — MLA: E-Commerce · Chicago: E-commerce
- twenty-first-century — MLA: Twenty-First-Century · Chicago: Twenty-first-Century
- mother-in-law — every style: Mother-in-Law, because “in” is a preposition
After a colon
All four styles capitalise the first word of a subtitle, which is why “A Guide: To the End” keeps its capital T even though “to” is a minor word everywhere else in the title.
Will the headline fit in Google?
Search results truncate on width, not on character count, and the two are not the same thing. Google renders desktop result titles in Arial at 20px inside a column about 600 pixels wide. A 60-character headline made of narrow letters fits comfortably; a 55-character headline full of capitals and Ms does not. Advice like “keep it under 60 characters” is a rough proxy for the real constraint.
The preview above measures the converted headline with a canvas text measurement in the same font and shows where the cut would land, along with the pixel width. It is an approximation of the layout rather than a screenshot: Google adjusts its rendering, it rewrites titles it thinks are unhelpful, and mobile results wrap differently. Treat 600px as the line worth staying under rather than a promise.
Two practical consequences. Front-load the words that matter, because the end of a long title is what disappears. And watch what title case does to width — switching a headline to UPPERCASE can add 10 to 15 per cent to its pixel width without changing a single character.
What the tool does with capitals you typed on purpose
A word that already contains a capital after its first letter — SEO, iPhone, eBay, NASA, McKinsey — is copied through untouched instead of being flattened to “Seo” or “Iphone”. That single rule is what makes most converters unusable for technical headlines.
The exception is an input that is entirely upper-case. THIS WOULD OTHERWISE READ AS ONE LONG ACRONYM, so a title with no lower-case letters anywhere is lower-cased first and then converted, and the tool tells you it did that. A single all-caps word on its own is left alone, because that really is an acronym.
Where the rules run out
No converter can tell a preposition from an adverb without understanding the sentence. “Turn Off the Lights” wants a capital O; “Off the Record” wants a lower-case one, in the middle of a title. Rather than guess, this tool keeps “up”, “out”, “down” and “off” capitalised, since they appear as verb particles in headlines more often than as prepositions. It also cannot know that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a film title inside your headline. Read the output before you publish it; the rule column makes the disagreements easy to spot.
A note on “capitalize my title”
If you searched that phrase, you were probably looking for a specific site by name. That query is mostly navigational — people typing a brand into the search box instead of the address bar — so this page does not try to pretend it is that site. It targets the generic thing you were going to do once you got there, which is convert a title to a named style. If the tool above is not what you wanted, the back button is faster than reading further.
Which style should you actually use?
- Writing for the web, a blog or a newsroom — an AP style title. It is what most publications and most CMS style guides assume, and it needs the least explanation to other people.
- Books, long-form essays, publishing — Chicago title case.
- Humanities coursework, literature citations — MLA.
- Psychology, education, the social sciences — APA.
- Product UI, buttons, headings in an app — sentence case, almost always. Every major platform style guide moved to it, it is easier to read at a glance, and it translates better.
The one rule that matters more than which guide you pick: be consistent inside a single publication. Mixed capitalisation across a set of headings is more noticeable to readers than any individual style choice.
Where VoiceSnap Pro fits
VoiceSnap Pro is a dictation app for macOS and Windows. Hold one keyboard shortcut, speak, and punctuated text appears in whatever field your cursor is already in — the CMS title field, the email subject line, the commit message. Dictation gets the words down; a tool like this one puts the capitals where a style guide wants them. It saves every dictation to a searchable notes library, and it is a one-time $39 purchase rather than a subscription.
It has not shipped yet. Join the waitlist for one email on release day, or try the browser voice typing tool first.
Questions people ask
Is my headline sent anywhere?
No. The conversion and the width measurement both run in your browser. There is no server call and nothing is stored.
Why is “is” capitalised?
Because it is a verb, and no style guide lower-cases verbs. Short words are only minor words when they are articles, conjunctions or prepositions. “Is”, “Be”, “Are”, “It” and “He” all keep their capitals in every style here.
Can I convert several headlines at once?
Yes. Put one per line in the box and each line is converted as its own title, with its own first and last word. The search-result preview measures the first line.
Does it handle accented characters and other alphabets?
Yes for capitalisation — the case rules work on any cased script, so é becomes É correctly. The minor-word lists are English, so a French or German title will have every word capitalised. The width measurement works on any characters the browser can render.
What is Start Case?
Every Word Capitalised, With No Exceptions At All. It is not a real editorial style, but it is what many people mean by title case, and it is what most spreadsheet PROPER() functions produce.
Why does the sentence-case output keep some capitals?
Because words with internal capitals are treated as acronyms or brand names and left alone, and the pronoun “I” is protected. Proper nouns without internal capitals — a person’s surname, a city — cannot be detected and will be lower-cased, so check names after converting to sentence case.
What about the character limit for a title tag?
There is no character limit, only a width limit. Use the pixel measurement above. If you need a plain character and word count as well, the word counter gives you both, and the sentence counter is the one for body copy.